University Libraries
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Item What if you could save the data?: Endangered Data Week & how libraries can protect public data(2019-05-02) Koivisto, JosephEndangered data and information is not a new problem, but the sheer volume of data in the era of digitally-generated and -mediated data has accelerated the problem. Technology churn, political turnover, lack of preservation resources, and simple neglect have put huge amounts of federal, state and local data at risk for disappearing entirely Mr Joseph Koivisto will provide an overview of the Endangered Data Week initiative and show us what libraries can do to facilitate the preservation of public data for future generations of students, scientists, and researchers.Item Harvesting MARC Data with the WorldCat Search API(2018-06-14) Bradley, BenjaminThe Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) hopes for a world where all content providers openly share their metadata with all discovery service providers, but we are still far from that world. While libraries depend more and more on publisher-provided metadata, libraries are often left with poor quality metadata or sometimes with no metadata at all. In this environment, librarians need to develop web-scale tools to provide web-scale discovery and access. In this lightning talk I will introduce a Python script I have been developing which uses the WorldCat Search API to batch search and download OCLC MARC records which I use to harvest metadata to supplement publisher-provided metadata or to transform the records into a KBART file for ingest.Item My very first robot: Programming a Twitter bot to promote open access scholarship(2018-06-14) Koivisto, Joseph; Koivisto, JosephSocial media is now recognized as an important element in promoting scholarship available on institutional repository sites. To capitalize on the value-added by social media engagement, automated "bots" can be deployed to facilitate social media outreach with minimal administrative investment. In this presentation, I'll provide an overview of social media's value in the context of open access publishing. I will also walk through the steps of creating a Python-based Twitter bot, providing high-level concepts that will be understandable for non-programmers. I will also provide a narrative description of my experience building my first Twitter bot to help reveal the sometimes hidden labor that goes in to the development of behind-the-scenes programmatic tools.Item Digital Stacks Maintenance: Using Computer Scripts to Provide and Ensure Access to E-Resources(2018-05-03) Bradley, BenjaminAs electronic resource collections continue to grow, librarians often struggle with maintaining these growing collections. Librarians need web-scale tools to manage e-resources in a web-scale discovery environment. This poster presents two tools I use to help manage e-resources. The first is a Ruby script originally developed by Kristina Spurgin, the E-Resource Access Checker. In the poster, I discuss how I use this tool and have developed the code further to meet my needs. The second tool is a Python script I have been developing which uses the OCLC WorldCat Search API to harvest metadata to supplement publisher provided metadata in our e-resource management tool, OCLC Collection Manager.Item Peer to peer: Using a discussion group to introduce staff and faculty to emerging technologies(2018-05-03) Koivisto, Joseph; Durden, DavidAwareness of new and emerging technologies is vital to the continuing education of library staff and faculty in settings ranging from public libraries to national research libraries. However, the complex nature of new technologies and limitations of prior tech literacy can prove to be a stumbling block for even highly motivated library workers. While the challenges of investigating new technologies may seem insurmountable, the implementation of group-oriented knowledge sharing methodologies can greatly reduce barriers to learning while also creating a constructivist setting in which library workers can learn together. At the University of Maryland Libraries, a staff- and faculty-led discussion group has taken on this challenge by administering monthly sessions where staff, faculty, and students are welcome to join conversations about new and emerging trends in technologies and libraries. By hosting staff specialists and volunteer speakers, sessions present difficult technology topics in a comfortable, open format. Furthermore, tool demonstrations allow attendees to discovery new applications and platforms that may have meaningful impacts on their day-to-day work. This poster presents a brief history of the Emerging Technologies Discussion Group, highlighting the variety of topics presented over the seven years of its existence. Additionally, this poster presents the benefits of such a low-stress, low-barrier group format. Lastly, the poster provides useful tips for those interested in starting a similar group, including topics such as important administrative considerations and suggested formats for discussion- and tool-oriented events.Item Dataset for Instructor Use of Educational Streaming Video Resources(2017-07) Horbal, AndyDataset for research project titled "Instructor Use of Educational Streaming Video Resources."Item Advocacy by Design: Moving Between Theory & Practice(2017-06-08) Lindblad, PurdomHow can librarians, archivists, and digital practitioners practice an Ethic of Care, in explicitly anti-racist and anti-violent ways? How can libraries contribute to the infrastructures needed to define, scope, and practice care? This talk focuses on research practices to do the speculative work of imagining what the infrastructures of an Ethic of Care could and should be. Advocacy by Design (AbD) is a design framework for critical engagement centered on advocacy. AbD articulates a series of principles—transparency, openness, polyvocalism (resisting one narrative, opening possibility of many points of view, many narratives around a single event), stewardship, etc.—and a series of applied techniques to realize these principles throughout the project’s cycle. This talk will first describe the broad focus of Advocacy by Design, with a particular attention to how it is a framework to help prompt reflection and articulation of the purposes of the project (any project from system design to creating a working group to helping at the reference desk), then to outline what the principles are for Advocacy by Design, highlight several ‘elements’ for each principle for a few example projects—within the Library and liaison-collaboration with researchers; and finally point towards why the library might care about centering design, particularly AbD, in our work, from the ways we think about and invite users to the library, to discovery interfaces, and to collaborations in digital projects.Item Identifying User Demographics in Digital Collections with Google Analytics(2016-06-08) Durden, DavidUsage statistics of digitized materials, when collected, can inform future project prioritization for increased access to materials. Demographic information collected through Google Analytics may provide insight into the behavior of users as they engage with digital collections. This presentation outlines some of the tactics used to analyze data collected by Google Analytics for the years 2013 through 2015 by answering questions such as, 'how are users getting to digital collections,' what searches are driving traffic,' and 'how do users navigate through digital collections'? Answers to these questions revealed additional demographic information including language barriers that prevent access to content, the popularity of particular subjects, changes in social media traffic both to and from digital collections, and popularity of device type and operating system among users.Item Controlled Vocabulary Enhancement through Crowdsourcing: Project Andvari, Micropasts, and Public Quality Assurance(Society of American Archivists, 2016-07) Koivisto, Joseph; Choi, YoungokThis paper presents an experimental approach of using crowdsourcing to test controlled vocabularies for digital collections of cultural objects. For a digital humanities initiative project, Project Andvari, which is intended to create a digital portal of early medieval northern European artifacts, it was recognized that there was a need to develop a semantically structured iconographic thesaurus to describe the iconographic content of distributed artefactual collections from a variety of contributing institutions. This paper discusses a workflow of planning and development process of controlled vocabularies for the project and a testing process of the vocabularies to determine both the usability of controlled vocabularies and the feasibility of quality assurance approach. This paper demonstrates an applicability of crowdsourcing in developing controlled vocabularies.Item Custom Analytics with Google Tag Manager: Assessing Usage Statistics on the MD-SOAR Platform(2016-06-08) Koivisto, JosephAs usage metrics continue to attain an increasingly central role in library system assessment and analysis, librarians tasked with system selection, implementation, and support are driven to identify metric approaches that simultaneously require less technical complexity and greater levels of data granularity. Such approaches allow systems librarians to present evidence-based claims of platform usage behaviors while reducing the resources necessary to collect such information, thereby representing a novel approach to real-time user analysis as well as dual benefit in active and preventative cost reduction. As part of the DSpace implementation for the MD SOAR initiative, the Consortial Library Application Support (CLAS) division has begun test implementation of the Google Tag Manager analytic system in an attempt to collect custom analytical dimensions to track author- and university-specific download behaviors. Building on the work of Conrad , CLAS seeks to demonstrate that the GTM approach to custom analytics provides both granular metadata-based usage statistics in an approach that will prove extensible for additional statistical gathering in the future. This poster will discuss the methodology used to develop these custom tag approaches, the benefits of using the GTM model, and the risks and benefits associated with further implementation.